Jane Doe January (24 page)

I tell her, too, about the sweetly emotional hospital nurses in 1992, how I made jokes to them, and how Bill was really good at his job. He wasn't always in charge of people; he was a detective then, Aprill's and Dan's job now, and just Evan's age, married but not a dad yet. I was a student then. Aprill was, too. It was a long time ago.

Aprill says that things are better organized now, that victims don't have to repeat their stories, like I'd had to do, for the uniformed police, then the medical staff, then Bill. That is probably better, but right now I can only think that it's a privilege to get to repeat it. It's a privilege to be listened to.

I tell her, because she'll understand, how funny it was that the uniformed police in my apartment had kept insisting that I sit. But I was only half clothed, holding my short, unbuttoned dress closed with my hands, and my couch was white. White!
Of course
I couldn't sit. I roll my eyes. She laughs.
Men
.

Actually, there had been a woman officer along, but she hadn't said much. I think she'd been included as a token, just in case. Aprill says that the stereotype of victims preferring female officers hasn't
been generally true in her observation. I agree that I hadn't cared one way or the other. The detectives had been men; the doctor had been a woman. I'd just wanted whoever was in charge.

One thing Aprill had wondered at my hearing in January is if it's off-putting to be questioned by specifically an
attractive
man. Let's just say that she thinks highly of Kevin.

I hadn't felt attracted to anyone in the stressful context of the hearing, so instead of answering her broader question, I get stuck on whether I agree about Kevin. I look into middle distance to consider and conclude, “I think Evan's way cute.”

“Evan? Nah.
Kevin,
” she insists.

“Ha! Nope. Evan. Totally.”

He's right there, on the other side of the table. I hope he hasn't heard. Aprill and I crack up. Well, ice broken, I guess. It's unfair that it feels harmless and flattering to be gossiping about the attorneys' looks while it would be appalling if they gossiped about ours, but there it is.

We share photos of husbands: mine, dark-haired and dark-eyed, holding our first baby thirteen years ago; then two summers ago at our fifteenth anniversary dinner, with grayed hair and wire-framed glasses, leaning confidently on a bar table while we wait to be seated. Aprill and her husband pose together in their uniforms, in an official “police yearbook” photo. He's a former city lieutenant recently turned small-town police chief. I share kid photos, my blond boy with retro glasses and my redhead whose gorgeous hair gets him stopped by Asian tour groups begging to take his picture. Aprill shows me a picture of her horse.

Maybe I am stoic. Am I supposed to act sadder? I am sad, but I don't know how that's supposed to make me act.

Dinner's almost over. My trip's almost over. I ask Aprill about whether she can work with Brooklyn police to find more recent cases to use against Fryar. New York's statute of limitations for rape
used to be a paltry five years, but in 2008 became no limit at all. Any rape he committed from then would be fair game.

She says that she'll try, but New York hasn't shown much interest. She assures me that my file is still in the active case pile. It's difficult for her to put it away.

I worry, too, about who else might get hurt by Fryar, though maybe he's too old now. Maybe he's weak. I know that sexual vigor isn't required, that his urges could be translated into some variant act, but he would still have to be strong. He'd have to be fast. He might not be those things anymore.

Evan had wondered, on Monday, if maybe Fryar has just stopped. We don't know for sure that he's gotten anyone else after 1992. Well, his convicted burglary in 1994 may have been an attempted rape, but we don't know that he's done anything since getting out of prison a decade later. New York proudly claims to have no evidence backlog anymore, so any reported, swabbed rape of his from Brooklyn should have matched in the FBI database by now.

Christine is firing questions at Evan, still hoping that this case can be salvaged. It can't. Having to defend Evan to Georgia and to Christine this week has helped me. I know, profoundly, where we stand with the law. Ethically, he'd had no choice but to withdraw the case. I can't speak for anyone who might be hurt by Fryar going forward, but for me, just me, and what I was to get out of this, I understand.

Organization is a powerful, amazing thing. That a plane can fly, that rubbing strings and blowing in tubes and hitting things with sticks combine to make music, that thousands of words in a certain order make a story, and that there's a legal system at all, is a marvel. All that cooperation. All that assertion and risk taking and leadership and agreement to create these systems, these enormous machines. That the city made their courthouse beautiful; that tells me something. I can't hate the law, not completely. It's the law that
got us this far, even if it's the law that's stopped us short of the finish line.

We're the last occupied table in the restaurant, and it reminds me of Evan taking me back to the hotel at midnight on Monday. None of them had had to come tonight; certainly none of them had to stay so late now. They must mean it, all of them; they're not just going along out of embarrassment for the way it ended, or just because I traveled so far.

The waitstaff are cleaning up around us. We gather coats and jackets off the backs of our chairs, and I push forward to tell Evan that I'm glad that he's my prosecutor, even though he destroyed the case. I assure him again, in front of impatient waiters, that even though he hurt me he did the right thing.

Back home, retrieving my UK power cord from the guest room where I'd had my laptop plugged in before I traveled, I find the paper towel on which I'd scrawled Evan's news that the case was over. I suppose it was the only thing I'd had at hand. I was trying to capture the words that I didn't recognize but would need again, and didn't get them quite right:
Supreme Court vs California. Stogner. 42 section 5552c1. Violates expo facto
[
sic
—should be “ex post”]
. Null cross
[
sic
again—should be “nolle prosequi”]
. Tolled.

“Tolling” is a legal term that has to do with statutes of limitations, but it brings to mind solemn bells.

I slip the paper towel between pages of a notebook, like pressing a flower, so that it won't get thrown away.

People in Cambridge worry because I'm not visibly falling apart. I tell entertaining stories, about the surprising and casual familiarity of watching the Steelers on TV at Evan's apartment, and about the practical, boring-looking Sex Assault office at police headquarters transformed by the unexpected leg iron in the interview room, re
vealing their job to be suddenly violent and frightening. I'm good at stories.

Or perhaps my friends see through the cracks, and I am falling apart behind a superficial and practical sociability. Maybe falling apart is yet to come. It took me about a month from the arrest to fall apart in John's office.

I don't think that I'm denying, repressing, or avoiding. It's just that I feel that I'm not myself solely responsible for all of the reactions to the unsatisfying end of the case. I feel like I'm part of larger groups that are taking care of a lot of that for me: us then, my old drama friends; us here, my Cambridge friends; and us in Pittsburgh: Evan, Aprill, Dan, and Bill, with me. These last two groups, Cambridge and Pittsburgh, are newly hatched usses, created these past few months. Their anger and sadness tick boxes for me. They've got those feelings in hand; I get to express them, too, if I wish but I don't have to worry that they'll go unexpressed if I play with other feelings instead.

There's a definite sense in middle age that families are inside of hard boxes; everyone inside affects everyone else inside, and everyone outside of the box, that very small box, inside of their own separate very small family boxes, are cast only as observers. My Cambridge friends had felt it when I went to the hearing, that they had no right to act as if it mattered to them. I felt it when John died, that I had no right to grieve him as I was grieving. But it did matter to them, and I did grieve. I feel like those rigid boxes have folded down their sides, and we admit now how much we affect each other.

Besides, how can you expect the people inside of the family boxes to take care of each other? It's not fair to say that because Gavin loves me most that he's the one who should have shouldered this alone. It's precisely because he loves me that he was hurt by it, too, and in need of help himself. We needed care from all sides, from
people a little bit distant, a little bit farther away, people who, while they felt the shock waves, weren't knocked over by them.

I've felt close to Bill since the hearing, but it wasn't until this trip that I've felt it with Dan and Aprill and Evan, too. Evan had said, when we ate those posh burgers and sweet-potato fries, that he'd wanted to offer to pick me up from the airport the day before, but had worried that that would be too forward because we hadn't yet met. His saying that had surprised me at first, but it was true, I realized, that we hadn't before that day met in person. Yet we had talked through such intimate, important things together over Skype, looking at one another, looking beyond each other at hints of our homes. I'd felt that I had met him already, and yet now that I've been actually in his home I see that it's different, profoundly different, to have been in the same place together.

It reminds me of when Gavin and I had lived on opposite sides of America seventeen years ago, me in Massachusetts and he newly transplanted to California from England. Talking on the phone had been daily; being together in person had been rare and treasured, monthly at best. We agreed one evening on the phone that getting married would be delightful, and that we ought to be courteous of the upcoming wedding of the friend who had introduced us. We could wait until a few months after her wedding, or really go for it and get married a couple of months before. If we were to do that, we'd have to get the church and hotel function room booked quickly. With his eager agreement, I made those arrangements that very week, in my quaint little town, all the while cautioning Gavin that we weren't actually engaged yet, not until he would ask me in person when I flew out for his twenty-ninth birthday at the end of the month. Silly, ridiculous; of course we were engaged; we were actively booking our wedding. But, perhaps not actually ridiculous.

The intangibles of sharing space, not even of touching but just of sharing the same air and temperature, of absorbing all of those
background perceptions of traffic and noise or of quiet, of crowds or of space, of hills or flatness, of green or brown, of dry or wet, of the color of the light, and whether it's trees that are tall there or buildings, that sync people in ways that can't be quantified but are easily perceived. To be someplace together matters.

Which is a long way of saying that I'm glad I went to Pittsburgh.

As for this fresh, just-baked, still-warm closeness here at home, I take care with it. I try to notice and congratulate triumphs, to wish luck for trying new things, and to commiserate over the sadnesses of others. Their bad news and even tragedies aren't competition for my recent cares; they provide a welcome opportunity to trample those newly fallen box walls and keep them down for good. For the most part, we talk about simple, everyday things, because such things are legion, and they do matter.

So when I tell funny stories about Pittsburgh—about Aprill and me comparing the attractiveness of the attorneys, of Christine appearing before the hearing only when Dan went to the men's room, of me being crude to the defense attorney back in January—it's not a deflection, no more than it was when I'd made those sad nurses laugh in 1992. It's those British hot and cold taps all over again: every feeling has its own faucet, and sometimes they're all open at once, side by side, not mixing. Those nurses had been sorrowful over me; and they'd smiled at my ridiculous jokes. One nurse had turned and left the examination room suddenly, I think so that I wouldn't see her cry, when I, still in shock, had asked her why I was bleeding (until then I had understood such bleeding to be a sort of medieval myth). Then they had blushed at young, handsome, authoritative-yet-empathetic Bill when he'd charged in to take over. All of the feelings were and are real, all at the same time, the good and sweet ones just as much as the terrible ones, even if sometimes the good ones seem weak in comparison.

I miss John. I wonder if I would be more free with tears if I were
in his office, with my feet tucked up, teasing him about not having a proper box of tissues to offer. I can't have been his only crying visitor. Maybe that explains it; maybe someone else had used them all up.

I see that Anna has a copy of John's first book (actually his doctoral thesis, which was subsequently published). I'd been intending to get one myself. She offers for me to take it, because it's not actually her copy, which she keeps elsewhere. This was John's own copy, she tells me, which she'd cleared out of his office.

I will eventually read it, but apart from its content it's a talisman to me. I carry it everywhere. I tell people who knew him that it's John's book, and they coo; then I tell them that it's John's own copy, and they gasp. We pass it around, flipping through the pages, which make a little rush of air like breath.

When we had first moved to Cambridge, eight years ago, one of the first local news stories I'd read was about three Chinese vases in the university's Fitzwilliam Museum that were shattered by a man who had tripped, possibly intentionally. It made such an impression on me that I referenced it in my first novel. The vases have since been reassembled, and my boys and I—when they were younger and less resistant to visiting museums—made a point of trying to find the thin lines where the pieces had been glued back together. The restorers had done a wonderful job of linking those hundreds of shards back into their original forms, and we'd had to squint and put our faces right up to the vases to find any traces of the breaks at all.